THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 69

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 69 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.

If you missed last week’s issue, or any others, you can always catch previous issues of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter here.

Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:

• The latest Digital PR news and resources

• 5 quick fire tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

• 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

• 5 successful campaigns from the archives

If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Digitaloft: The Digital PR Summit 2026: Key takeaways and expert insights from every session

Propellernet: Our Favourite Talks from the Digital PR Summit 2026

Wolfenden: 6 Key Takeaways from the 2026 Digital PR Summit

BuzzStream: How to Transition From Link Building to Digital PR

PRmoment: The playbook for PR agencies who want to own GEO

Get Featured: Why pitching is a competition

Cision: The Complete Guide to Building a Data-Driven PR Strategy

Moz: How To Make Your Brand Discoverable in AI Search

Moz: How to Integrate PR & SEO for Maximum Brand Visibility

Search Engine Land: The digital PR duplication method: Rinse, reuse, repeat

Ahrefs: Why ChatGPT Cites One Page Over Another (Study of 1.4M Prompts)

Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR Dates for May

Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: What's happening in May for PR opportunities?

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Pitch Journalists Like a PR Pro w/ Carly Martinetti

BuzzStream Podcast: AI, Fake Experts, and What Still Works In PR with Rob Waugh

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Inside One Journalist’s Qwoted Workflow

Search with Candour Podcast: The Mental Health Crisis in SEO & Digital Marketing w/ Jasmine Granton

Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:

1️⃣ Use backlink tools to also check for links pointing to the urls of your coverage. Some sites that find your story direct from existing coverage may cover and link to that page rather than yours but are often happy to link to you if you point out you're the original source.

2️⃣ The sites you want links from are the sites that your target audience read, not the sites with the highest DA score.

3️⃣ How to find a list of editors at a publication. Google site: followed by the domain and then "masthead" which if they have one will bring up a staff list, often with their emails listed. E.g. site:vogue.com masthead

4️⃣ How to use =ISEMAIL in Google Sheets to catch typos in email addresses. Data > Data Validation > Change Criteria to "Custom formula is" and enter =ISEMAIL(B2) > Reject input. This wont tell you if an email exists or not but it will reject anything that isn't a valid domain.

5️⃣ Bad experiences make for good experience. You can't avoid bad experiences in Digital PR. Don't think of them as bad experiences but rather good learning opportunities.

Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.

1️⃣ HMRC Personal Incomes Statistics for the Tax Year 2023 to 2024

HMRC is an amazing resource for finance and income related datasets for the UK - tax records reveal so much about the economy! Yesterday the latest personal income statistics report was released which has tons of great data categorised by age groups, sex, local authority, and industries for metrics such as median income for employees and self-employed, pension payments, property income, and dividend payments.

2️⃣ AI Patents by Country

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a great insight into patents that are being taken out around the world. The database has loads of filtering options which allow you to create reports tailored to the industries/topics you want to analyse such as this one that shows the number of AI patents filed in 2024 per country.

3️⃣ Stat Significant - Spotify & TikTok Music Trends

A few issues I go I told everyone about the amazing Stat Significant newsletter that you should all subscribe to if your job involves creating data-led stories and/or you love reading data stories on entertainment topics. They’ve recently started releasing these trends reports that curate data from various data sources including this Spotify and TikTok Music trends report which is a great insight into how people are consuming and discovering new music.

4️⃣ Stat Significant - The Streaming Report

And they’ve also got a new trends report focusing on streaming services to help you better understand what TV Shows and Movies people are watching across popular streaming services. While streaming services release all of this data themselves, this report is a great way of comparing them against one another. There’s also a paid version with even more data insights.

5️⃣ Coasterpedia

As the name suggests, Coasterpedia is a site with all the data and information that you’d ever want to know about rollercoasters and amusement parks. Obviously rollercoaster stories are niche but if they fit your brand then there’s lots of great datasets to explore on this site for different types of rides and country rankings.

In this next section, I take a look at five campaigns from my archive of campaign inspo, with some quick fire analysis of what I liked about them and what made them work. Referring Domains (RDs) figures are taken from ahrefs.

1️⃣ How many cigarettes you’re indirectly smoking due to air pollution levels by HouseFresh

📊 59 RDs, 30 DR 50+

Comparison points are one of your strongest assets when producing data-led stories that really resonate with people and this is a terrific example of that in practice. For this campaign, HouseFresh ranked global cities based on the average PM2.5 concentration in the air using IQAir air quality data.

Now that alone would be a strong campaign ranking the cities with the worst air quality. It’s simple but it’s effective and I’m sure it would get coverage. It’s almost definitely been done before though and there’s a good chance we might run into that dreaded scenario where someone else launches the same campaign idea we’ve been working on before the client finally gets round to signing it off.

This campaign went a step further and made their data not only more unique than other stories using the same data, but also made it a lot more relatable to the average person. 108.3 µg/m3 doesn’t mean anything to me and I’m guessing it doesn’t much to 99% of the population.

The equivalent of smoking 1,797 cigarettes a year? Ok I know what a cigarette is. I know they’re bad for my health. That also sounds like an awful lot of cigarettes (almost five a day!). Now with one quick and easy comparison to something everyone can relate to, a complicated data stat is now much easier to understand, and therefore much more shocking and emotive when people read it.

If your data campaigns aren’t landing but you’re confident the data is good, try reframing it by comparing it against something. It can be something creative like this campaign, or it can be as simple as comparing to a previous year or against a more localised dataset if you’re targeting regional news sites.

2️⃣ The Most Unhealthy Menu Items at America’s Fast-Food Chains by PlushCare

📊 205 RDs, 47 DR 50+

This next campaign is a great example of how effective creating campaigns around topics that the majority of the population can easily relate to can be, along with the power of tapping into topics that evoke strong emotional responses. To reveal which American fast food chains have the most unhealthy menu’s, PlushCare analysed nutritional data for popular items such as cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, and vanilla shakes.

This campaign has a lot of different topics on the menu that work really well for creating engaging stories - food, famous brands, health, and comparisons! And when you create a great piece of content with original research on high engagement topics, you can earn a boatload of backlinks like this campaign has done with links on sites such as TimeOut, Daily Mail, and Men’s Health.

But arguably of more value is the keywords you can rank your campaigns for when you tap into topics that produce high volume searches. For example, this campaign ranks 1st for “most unhealthy fast food” (2,500 MSV in U.S.) and “unhealthiest fast food” (1,300 MSV in U.S.), with a total of nearly 1,000 monthly organic sessions, and peaking at nearly, 5,000. Backlinks are great because they help our site to rank for keywords and bring in traffic, but really great campaigns can go the extra mile and also generate traffic directly to the campaign page as well as the rest of the site.

3️⃣ Airports With the Longest Security Lines During the Holidays by Jettly

📊 37 RDs, 15 DR 50+

This is another campaign that earned some great backlinks by tapping into a topic that their target audience has strong feelings about - wait times at airports. To reveal the worst airports for wait times, Jettly analysed data from US Customs and Border Protection and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics to determine the average peak wait times in TSA lines during the 2023 Thanksgiving and winter holidays for the 34 largest airports in the 50 US states.

This is a really cool use of a unique data source and benefits from not just covering a topic that gets people annoyed, but also creates a regional ranking to allow regional Journalists to write stories more specifically aimed at their readers. Relatable topic + strong emotional response + unique data insights = a great PR story.

With this campaign I also really like how they’ve looked at wait times specifically during busy holiday periods to make the story even more relatable, while also using survey data to add in extra insights from travellers that nicely compliments the data findings on wait times.

4️⃣ Daylight saving time causes spikes in fatal car crashes by Amanda Demanda

Another super example here of adding extra context to your data to help turn it into a more relatable story. Here, law firm Amanda Demanda analysed data on fatal car crashes in America showing how drowsy driving contributes to over 100,000 vehicular crashes a year.

That stat on it’s own would be a great way of setting up some expert commentary to warn drivers of the dangers of driving when you’re tired. Or they could rank the top states for car crashes caused by tired drivers, both of which would make for strong stories.

For this story however they went in a different direction and used the first day of daylight saving time as a reference point to show how cases of crashes caused by tired drivers spike the day after clocks go forward and we lose an hour of sleep.

We’ve seen the power of comparison points in the HouseFresh campaign and this is a great example of how reference points can also help to make your data stories easier to understand and allow you to create stronger headlines. Using specific dates as reference points is also a terrific way of making your story super topical on a certain date - great for giving Journalists more urgency to cover your story on a specific date.

5️⃣ The Guinnbrella by Guinness

This final campaign is a cute little PR stunt that Guinness did last year with the launch of “The Guinnbrella” - a mini umbrella to help your pint stay dry in the rain. Continuing the theme of relatable topics being the starting point for successful PR campaigns, this is another great example of that in action. Especially here in the UK, we’ve all experienced the joy of a sunny day in a beer garden just for the government to randomly turn the weather machine to rain out of nowhere (today’s example of Matt is too chronically online for his own good).

I think sometimes we associate stunt campaigns from big brands with big budgets that are out of the scope of what is possible with the budgets that a lot of Digital PR teams have compared to Traditional PR. This is very low budget however but rich in creativity. A great example of how creative campaigns don’t have to be exclusively for Traditional PR teams with massive budgets.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 69. Same time again next week ✌️

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Each week in the newsletter, you’ll get:

• The latest Digital PR news and resources

• 5 tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

• 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

• 5 successful campaigns that we liked

If you’ve missed any previous editions of the newsletter, you can go through the archive of issues on the Digital PR Tips website.

Have any feedback for the newsletter? Anything you liked, disliked, or want to see more of? Send an email to matt@digitalprtips.com and let me know 🙂